A conventional method for activating a computer system is to install an operating system in the computer system. When the computer system is activated, basic system booting operation is performed, and once the booting process is completed, the computer system loads and executes the operating system and then loads and executes various drivers and application programs.
As the computers become more powerful, the computers get various applications in different fields and the computer manufacturers develop various designs to enhance computer usefulness to comply with the needs in different fields. For example, a recent popular design is a computer-based multimedia system integrating a multimedia player and a computer system.
However, the hardware design and the functionality objects of the computer system are different from those of multimedia players or household appliances. Therefore, when a computer-based system includes either a household appliance or a multimedia player with a computer system, the time required for activating the computer-based system is usually much longer than the press-and-play household appliance or multimedia player, such as CD or VCD players.
When a user uses a computer, it is seldom for the user to use all the functions provided by the computer. In general, many users use only one function, such as playing music, video, or watching TV. However, to activate such functions in a computer-based multimedia system, the user must reboot the computer first and wait for the computer to finish the basic input/output system (BIOS) activation, power-on self test (POST), detection and driving of peripherals, operating system activation, and so on, before the multimedia playing function can be executed.
To shorten the time required for activating a computer-based system, the conventional method is to include a second operating system in a separated region of the hard disk drive to provide the multimedia playing function.
Although the above method provides the user with the selection between a normal computer mode or a multimedia playing mode, the execution speed is still restricted by the speed to access the hard disk drive when the computer activates the operating system and accesses the data on the hard disk drive.
Furthermore, when the computer executes the multimedia playing functions, such as playing CD, VCD, digital music, or TV programs, the amount of multimedia data is large and it takes much of the CPU of the computer to access and process the multimedia data. Therefore, the speed for the computer to process other tasks is slow and the stability of the computer is affected.